Felix Mendelssohn
February 3rd of this year [2009] marked the bicentennial of the birth of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), a composer, pianist, organist and conductor whose prodigious musical talents rivaled those of Mozart, and who, like Mozart, did not live to see his 40th birthday. But young Felix came from a well-to-do German family and he, along with a brother and two sisters, was raised in an intellectually stimulating and stable environment, and thus was protected from the childhood exploitation that Mozart endured. Mendelssohn benefited from an impressively well-rounded education, and in addition to studying the piano, the violin and composition he developed skills as a visual artist, evidenced in over 300 surviving paintings and drawings of remarkable quality. At sixteen, Mendelssohn produced his first masterwork, the Octet for Strings, Op. 20, and the following year saw the completion of the brilliant A Midsummer Night’s Dream concert overture (Op. 21) -- so, in terms of achieving his musical "maturity," Mendelssohn surpassed even Mozart.
Between the ages of 12 and 14 young Felix composed a dozen symphonies for string orchestra as student exercises, at first mimicking 18th-Century formal procedures. Working under the guidance of composer Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758-1832), the 12-year-old Mendelssohn wrote the first seven of his 12 Sinfonias for strings in 1821. Like the others in this early group, Sinfonia No. 2 in D major (MWV N.2) follows a 3-movement, fast-slow-fast outline, apparently taking as a model works by J.S. Bach's son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788).
When he was 20, Mendelssohn sparked the revival of interest in the music of J.S. Bach and also gained international fame by conducting the first performance of the St. Matthew Passion since Bach’s death. During his tenures as conductor in Düsseldorf (1833-1835) and Leipzig (1835-1845), Mendelssohn likewise rekindled interest in the music of Handel, and works he premiered included Schubert’s newly-discovered Symphony No. 9. Through the course of his career he became something of a superstar performer and composer especially in Great Britain, and was a particular favorite of Queen Victoria. But, as did many in his family, Mendelssohn suffered from hypertension, and was often in ill-health, especially during the last years of his life. He died from a series of strokes in 1847, and was survived by his wife, Cécile, and their five children.
In contrast to many of his flamboyant contemporaries, Mendelssohn neither overcame abject poverty, had a string of adulterous affairs, nor suffered syphilitic insanity—consequently, his reputation as a “Romantic” suffered. After Mendelssohn died, Richard Wagner became a particularly vociferous critic, lumping him with the likes of Brahms as examples of, in his mind, the unimpassioned, backward-looking drivel in dire contrast to his own more worthy creations of genius. Of course, in addition to tooting his own tuba, Wagner had ulterior motives which had nothing to do with the music itself. For one, Maestro Mendelssohn apparently had rejected (and possibly lost) the score to Wagner’s early Symphony. For another, Wagner was virulently anti-Semitic, and although Mendelssohn was by all accounts a devout Lutheran, his grandfather Moses, a well-known philosopher, was Jewish. Sadly, Wagner’s propaganda did have a negative effect among many critics even through most of the 20th Century, and not only among the Nazis who actually banned his works.
[ALTERNATE: His musical legacy includes the well-known "Scottish" and "Italian" Symphonies, his often-performed and recorded Violin Concerto, and Elijah, which is surpassed only by Handel's Messiah in popularity among large-scale sacred oratorios.]
But Mendelssohn’s music has never fallen out of favor with concertgoers, and his flawless Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64, remains among the most-frequently performed and recorded concertos ever written, and his Elijah (1846) likely has received more performances than any other large-scale oratorio with the exception of Handel’s Messiah.
Long regarded as the quintessential recessional for weddings, it is perhaps the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummernight’s Dream (Op. 61, 1843) that has received the most public performances. Ironically, this March is frequently paired with the bridal processional (“Here Comes the Bride…”) from Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin—it seems that posterity finds Mendelssohn’s music the perfect complement to Wagner’s, so the two therefore have been forever married, as it were.
Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844)
Allegro molto appassionato (E minor) - Andante (C major) - Allegretto non troppo / Allegro molto vivace (E minor)
The prodigious musical talents of Felix Mendelssohn rivaled those of Mozart, and like Mozart, Mendelssohn did not live to see his 40th birthday. But his affluent German family provided young Felix with an intellectually stimulating and stable environment, and protected him from the childhood exploitation that Mozart endured. At sixteen, Mendelssohn produced his first masterwork, the Octet for Strings, Op. 20, and the following year saw the completion of the brilliant A Midsummer Night’s Dream concert overture. In terms of achieving his musical maturity, Mendelssohn surpassed even Mozart.
In contrast to many of his flamboyant contemporaries, Mendelssohn neither overcame abject poverty, had a string of adulterous affairs, nor suffered syphilitic insanity—consequently, his reputation as a "Romantic" has suffered. He grew into a superstar composer, pianist, organist and conductor, and he also founded Germany's first conservatory, located in Leipzig. But after he died, Richard Wagner became a particularly vociferous critic, lumping Mendelssohn with the likes of Brahms for their backward-looking drivel, compared with his own creations of genius. In addition to tooting his own tuba, Wagner had ulterior motives which had nothing to do with Mendelssohn's music. For one, Maestro Mendelssohn had rejected (and possibly lost) the score to Wagner’s early Symphony. For another, Wagner was virulently anti-Semitic, and Mendelssohn, although Protestant himself, was the grandson of a well-known Jewish philosopher.
Many pundits allowed Wagner’s propaganda to fuel negativity toward Mendelssohn through most of the 20th Century, but Mendelssohn’s music never lost favor with concertgoers. Nor with bride's: the Wedding March from A Midsummer Night’s Dream has long been regarded as the quintessential recessional for weddings. Ironically, Mendelssohn's March frequently is paired with the bridal processional from Wagner’s Lohengrin—it seems posterity finds in Mendelssohn’s music the perfect complement to Wagner’s, so the two composers are now forever married.
Mendelssohn’s flawless Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64, is among the most frequently-performed concerted works, and one of the most influential. It was composed for violinist Ferdinand David, a long-time friend of the composer who provided technical advice, and possibly coauthored the demanding first-movement cadenza. Unusual for the time, the cadenza is written out rather than left for soloists to improvise, and it occurs as a bridge between the development section and recap, rather than at the coda. Other formal innovations include having the soloist introduce the principal music of the first movement by dispensing with an orchestral exposition, and connecting all three movements into an unbroken musical stream.
The year after the Concerto's 1845 premiere, Mendelssohn achieved another triumph with Elijah, a sacred oratorio second in popularity only to Handel'sMessiah. But the Violin Concerto proved to be Mendelssohn's last orchestral masterpiece, and perhaps the work that best fulfilled the promise of the former Wunderkind.
Fantasie in F# minor, Op. 28,"Scottish Sonata"
Although the final manuscript of this Fantasie in F# minor was not published until 1834, the composer’s letters suggest that the work originated in 1828, around the same time that he wrote his “Scottish” Symphony and the Hebrides Overture. At the time of publication Mendelssohn himself suppressed his original title, Sonate ecossaise, but it nonetheless shares musical characteristics with his other Gaelic inspirations, so the nickname has sneaked its way back into use. Considered one of Mendelssohn’s finest works for the virtuoso pianist, its title and formal design suggest that it is perhaps patterned after Beethoven’s Sonata quasi una fantasia (“Moonlight Sonata”), with three movements each faster than the previous, even though Mendelssohn’s thematic material is nothing like Beethoven’s.
Sonata for Violin & Piano in F Major (1838)
The first two of Mendelssohn‘s three sonatas for violin and piano were composed at ages 11 and 16 respectively. This evening’s Sonata dates from 1838 and is a work of his maturity, but it was never submitted for publication by the composer, nor does it appear to have been performed prior to its rediscovery by British virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin in the early 1950s. This has caused some to ponder why Mendelssohn might have “rejected” so fine a work, but it is much more likely that the composer simply never found time to revise the Sonata to his full satisfaction. Unlike so many composers, Mendelssohn did not depend on the publication of his works for income, so he had the luxury of taking as much time as he wanted to refine various details—e.g., even though Mendelssohn first conducted his ever-popular “Italian” Symphony (No. 4) in 1833, he still was withholding it from publication at the time of his death 14 years later!